New Hard Routes on Baffin Island Big Walls

The strong team of Nicolas Favresse, Sean Villanueva, Matteo De Zaiacomo, Matteo Della Bordella and Luca Schiera have returned from 10 weeks of Baffin Island climbing. The world-class climbers climbed a number of new routes up to 5.12d and 1,000 metres. The teams climbed the routes in fast times from camp to camp and placed no bolts.

New routes include Down the Slope Without a Ski 5.12a 1,000 metres and E Poi Boh 5.11d 800 metres on the Walker Citadel, Coconut Connection 5.12d 1,050 metres (all free over eight days) and Mascalzone Latino 5.12b 600 metres and Northwest Passage 5.12a 1,050 metres on Great Sail Peak, Seed of Madness 5.11c A0 700 metres and 24 Hours Camp to Camp 5.11d 600 metres on East Prow of Copier Pinnacle, Catacomb 5.12a 900 metres on Citadel in Stewart Valley.

GREAT SAIL PEAK – What we climbed For the main part of the expedition the Stewart Valley was the theatre of our big wall concerts and the Great Sail Peak was the main stage. The band made up by the two professional Belgian musicians Nico and Sean and by the three untuned Italians Giga, Luca and Matteo created three different melodies on this outstanding 1100 meters high stage. – In Red: "the coconut connection" the main track of the trip, created in big wall style over 8 days by all the members of the team. It is not a new route. It is rather a connection of the American route (first part) and Russian route (upper part) with some major variations in between. It has been done all on free climbing, which was the real goal of the team: finding a beautiful, hard and challenging line to free climb on this wall (the fact that somebody was there before aid climbing with minus 30 degrees – and graded it A4 – was an impressive performance but not very relevant for our choice). After this climb, having some more days of food, the team instead of going back to base camp decided to stop on the big ledge and climb another two lines in Alpine style: – In Green: the melody composed by the Belgian team Sean&Nico in the center of the wall. A real King Line, composed in perfect style, all onsight in a 34 hour push ledge to ledge on 07/08 of July. – In Blue: the Italian answer to the belgians "mascalzone latino", composed by Matteo and Luca in the same days (Giga reported a muscolar injury in the previous climb) within a 24 hour push ledge to ledge. The melody is slightly less than perfect since the complete free ascent vanished after a pendulum on the last pitch. All the routes were composed without the help of any bolt. Besides this there has been many other concerts of the band, with many other new melodies… Stay tuned for more!!! With @lucaschiera_alpinista, @gigaman93, @nicofavresse #seanvillanueva #livewithoutlimits #terrex @adidasoutdoor #Kong @terracielomare @dfsportspecialist @ragnidilecco @cailecco #Acel #CAAI #baffinisland #expedition #bigwall #baffinbigwallconcert #greatsailpeak #Stewartvalley #firstascent #freeclimbing

A photo posted by Matteo Della Bordella (@matteodellabordella) on Aug 1, 2016 at 6:17am PDT